5 WordPress Website Maintenance Tips to Keep Your Site Running

5 WordPress Website Maintenance Tips

Keyword(s): WordPress website maintenance

Did you create your website using WordPress? If so, you’ll need to periodically perform some website maintenance to keep it running well and ensure it continues to be a secure site your customers can trust.

But what types of maintenance does your WordPress website need? We have the 5 essential WordPress website maintenance tips to keep your site running smoothly.

1. WordPress Website Maintenance Starts With Backing Up Your Site

There’s nothing worse than losing all your information because you forgot to back it up. Not only will it take up a lot of extra time, it’s hugely stressful and in most cases, completely avoidable.

But first, you need to make sure your backups are actually working. There’s nothing worse than thinking you’re doing website maintenance and then finding out the hard way it was all for nothing.

It’s a smart idea to have access to at least three backups. You should also consider having backups located in at least two physical locations like your external drive and your computer. Lastly, store at least one copy on the Cloud.

That way, your backups have backups, just in case of ransomware, a horrible virus, or even a natural disaster.

2. Don’t Forget to Check for Updates

You’re leaving yourself and your company vulnerable to hackers if you don’t update your website as soon as a new version becomes available. But it’s not just WordPress that needs to be checked for updates.

Your plugins and themes are also subject to updates so check them regularly, as well. The great part is that updating is easy. All you need to do is check the Update tab and click on the button.

3. Check for Broken Links

Broken links aren’t just annoying to your customers, search engines like Google don’t care for them either. It’s not just internal links you have to check for. External links can slow down your website too.

But this type of WordPress website maintenance isn’t exactly easy. The larger your site and the longer you’ve had your site, the more difficult it will be to locate which links aren’t working.

Luckily, WordPress has a broken link checker to help you out. Once installed, head to Tools and then Broken Links. After that, you can either fix or remove the link entirely.

4. Clean Out Your Spam Comments

Spam comments are useless. They aren’t even generated from a real human being. No matter how it comes to you, spam takes up precious space on your website. They also take away from the real comments your customers are leaving on your site.

They also take away from the real comments your customers are leaving on your site. While they will be deleted after 30 days, it’s smarter for you to clear them up more regularly.

5. Check How Quickly Your Site Loads

Optimization is important and should be a regular part of your WordPress website maintenance. Sometimes you can unknowingly slow down your site by adding a plugin. This tool by Pingdomcan help you test your page load times.

Of course, website maintenance takes time and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could open yourself up to some serious security risks. So put your website in the hands of professionals. Contact us and let us handle your website maintenance so you never have to worry again.